


Verisimilitude

by Whreflections



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal (TV) RPF
Genre: Acting, Antler Hallucinations, Consensual Necrophilia, Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, Mind Palace Sex, Polyamory, RPF, Rimming, Season/Series 04, Visions, in a dream, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-03
Updated: 2017-05-03
Packaged: 2018-10-27 06:45:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10803912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whreflections/pseuds/Whreflections
Summary: The filming date for the first sex scene between Hannibal and Will is set.  The fans are ready, the whole crew is ready...Mads thinks he and Hugh need to practice.  For a scene years in the making, they don't want to get this wrong.





	Verisimilitude

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HapticLacuna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HapticLacuna/gifts).



> Soooo like....last March, this fic was requested as a birthday present. 
> 
> I am fucking terrible, but at least it's finally done? XD
> 
> Ily, best hedgehog ever.

Rather than the bag of take-out Hugh’d expected, Mads pressed his copy of the script to Hugh’s chest, slightly off-center.  His left hand held his cigarette, drawn slow away from his lips. 

“We need to have sex.” 

Hugh’s quick glance down the balcony was all reflex, spurred by years of practice, somewhat guiltily aborted as Mads waved his hand. 

“There’s no one; I walked up.  Come on, let me in.” 

As if he ever did, or could, do anything else.  Reflexively, Hugh reached up to catch the script as he stepped back, making room for Mads to come in past him.  They were never watched, here, and it would hardly matter if they were.  Bryan knew about them, and at least half the crew.  More than half, probably.  Whether they all understood the circumstances was less certain, but he’d hoped their behavior during the times Claire and Hanne visited would have made it obvious they had nothing to hide from anyone but the press. 

Acceptance at home was one thing; public opinion was another entirely. 

By the time Hugh locked the door, Mads had already sprawled in the chair he’d pulled away from the breakfast table.  There was a casual grace to him even like this, spread out and smoking a half gone cigarette in a navy blue tracksuit. 

He felt altogether more fond of him than he should at the moment toward a man who hadn’t even brought dinner.  Hugh supposed it was the years between, the long stretches they’d had without the opportunity for _this_ , living up in each other’s space for weeks at a time, uninterrupted—working and talking and making love and getting in each other’s hair and occasionally on last nerves that always regenerated. 

Hugh tossed the script down onto the table.  “Not that I’m opposed to having sex, but I’d assumed we’d have dinner first.” 

Mads took a quick drag, shook his head while he held it.  “No.  No dinner; not yet.  We need to have sex first, and we may have time.  We can order a pizza.”

“Romantic.”

“A working dinner.”  The corners of Mads eyes crinkled with his smile.  With Hugh watching, that smile widened to show the points of his teeth.  “We have to practice, for Monday.” 

Ah.  _Monday_. 

The crew had taken to calling it ‘sex on a boat’ a few days ago and it had stuck, already flying around with a lot more ease than the shoot date.  More ease than Hugh felt about the moment, too.  A lot had led up to this.  There was weight to it, the press of history.  Theirs, the show’s, the collective hopes of every fan who’d watched and let themselves believe.  It was a great deal of pressure to put on too deeply damaged men clinging to life and freedom in the Atlantic by the skin of their teeth.   

Hugh sank down to the edge of the bed, one hand scrubbing across the scrape of his stubble.  It was strange, adjusting to Will’s body again, after he’d lived three season in Cal’s.  “I’m not sure _practice_ is going to help.  I mean, they won’t have—don’t you think it’s best if we do it as raw as we can?  Fresh, a few takes?” 

“No, I don’t.”  With Mads, at least you never had to worry about him not saying what he thought.  The thought was enough to bubble laughter up in Hugh’s chest, though Mads cut it off.  “No; listen to me.  Listen.”  He _was_ listening, and Mads was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees as if proximity helped Hugh listen when they were less than three feet apart.  “We can’t do it like that; it’s too important for—“  He gestured, reached for the word, or for Hugh to understand him and finish.

Either way, Hugh could.  “Constraint?”

“Constraint, precisely.  We do it for the first time there, we won’t really be doing it at all—“

“Yes, well, Starz did pick us up but pretty sure even they’ll drop us if we start filming porn.”

“—and that’s a shame because it won’t, it won’t be the same.  We need to _feel_ this in the moment, to flesh it out.”  The only indication he’d heard Hugh at all was the fact that he’d talked a little louder. 

Hugh’s eyebrows rose, a soft chuckle escaping when he met Mads’s eyes.  God, he was so earnest.  “That’s very method of you.” 

“Do you really think I’m wrong?”  His eyes were bright, focused.  _Excited_.  He’d thought about this a great deal.  “Don’t you want to do it properly?  We do it, and we know, and then when we film we can fill out the edges better knowing what came in between.” 

If Mads had looked less serious, he might have had the heart to make a joke, there.  No doubt Mads had already thought it in his head, anyway.  Still, Hugh refrained.  He had to admit, the excitement was infectious.  The weight of Monday _had_ been pressing on the back of his neck, a looming force.  It’d feel less overbearing once they’d walked through the great mass of it together. 

Hugh sighed, stood and rolled his shoulders, massaged his neck.  Removed his wedding ring.  Last Thursday, he’d filmed the moment Will let himself realize how thoroughly his old life had been subsumed, how ready he was to let it go. 

He’d perched above deck on their boat, a rope for the sails wrapped around his arm, wind whipping his face and the slight burn of the rope chafing at skin gone pale from the presence of a ring he hadn’t worn since he’d woken up on a beach sprawled next to Hannibal.  When he was honest with himself, he hadn’t missed it until after they’d patched each other up at vet clinic surrounded by pines.  He’d stood in a parking lot gone soft with needles beneath his feet, and realized that his hand was bare. 

On the boat, with the solid weight of the rope and the demanding blast of the wind, he’d told himself as he had in the parking lot that he’d lost it in the water, but neither version of himself had honestly believed it to be true.  He could see the reality as clearly as if he’d remembered it, his body limp and almost unconscious on the sand, Hannibal bleeding against him, panting from the swim, fingers so numb with blood loss and cold that they trembled a little when they took the ring from Will’s finger. 

Well.  Maybe it was the blood loss and cold. There, he couldn’t be sure.  He’d gained much insight where Hannibal was concerned, but to do it he’d had to give up a few he’d thought he knew.  It was strange, to walk on such familiar ground with new eyes. 

Hugh shook himself a little, but only a little.  If they were going to do this, he needed to fall deeper into Will than that.  He placed the ring on the table by the script with a soft smile, on a whim leaned down to tangle his fingers in Mads’s hair and kiss him before they started.  It was brief, chaste, and still he could imagine he tasted smoke in the curve of Mads’s smile.  Conditioning, and familiarity. 

“Okay.”  He said it more to hear his own voice than for the sake of clarity.  Mads had known when he stood up, Hugh was sure of it, and yet—

“Okay?”

“Yes.  Okay.  From the railing.”  In lieu of a boat railing, he had the back of a wooden chair.  Hugh adjusted it, situating himself directly behind it, fingers curled over the top rung.  His imagination would have to earn its keep, but he’d had harder settings to find his way in in half a dozen plays.  He’d manage.  Will had become easy to find.  “You enter.” 

With his eyes closed, he didn’t see Mads stand and become Hannibal.  He didn’t need to; he’d seen it before and the transformation always impressed him, but it was a distraction, too.  He didn’t need to be distracted right now.  He needed to reach Will Graham, to settle into him so that when Hannibal approached the railing to stand with him…

Ah.  There he was.  Right there, in the prickle of warmth down the side of his arm, standing a little too close and raising the hair.  Will swallowed. 

“An afternoon of calm like this must remind you of your last voyage, and the time it gave you it to consider turning back.” 

Will’s exhale was slow, even and inexorable.  “I didn’t consider turning back.” 

“Turning away, then.”

Yes, he’d considered that. 

“A good sailor has the world at his fingertips.  You could have gone anywhere.  Become anyone.” 

“Oh, I—“  Will’s breath was pained, measured in force by his cheek.  Hugh could almost feel the phantom ache of it, just there.  So real he almost reached up to touch it, though he stopped himself just in time.  The lack of stitches would throw him off center.  “—think we both know what I’d _become_ had already been preordained.” 

“You think in opening your eyes to the beat of your core, I’ve taken choice away from you?”

“I think you took Bedelia to Italy and called her your wife, and that plan was made up on the fly.  What had you laid out for me?”  Will’s hands flexed, his eyes snapping open just out of rhythm.  There was more fire in that first unveiling than he’d let Hannibal see, his eyes already cooled by the time they met his.  “Husband?” 

Hannibal’s swallow was there, just there, and gone.  A ghost of movement, as visible to Will as the white of a frog’s throat when he breathes.  Visible, because he knew to look.  “It seemed the logical conclusion for our identities, yes.  Two fathers, travelling with their daughter.” 

To a country where gay marriage was illegal, to traipse through ancient cathedrals and venture out into society.  There was nothing logical about it, but God help him, Will could see it. 

Well.  He doubted _God_ was helping him.  The fingers pulling scales from his eyes were of an entirely different make, thin and lithe and always just right.  Cool, when Will’s fever had burned.  Cool on swollen skin when he’d been shot.  Warm when Hannibal had carried him through the snow, a blur remembered only in snatches. 

Perhaps the warmth had been the blood. 

“Did you take us there, in your mind palace?”

“No.  I can never recreate you with any degree of authenticity.  I stopped trying.” 

“I saw Abigail there.”  It came out much more idle than he felt.  Slight, for something strong enough to take Hannibal’s breath.  The silence as he held it and waited for Will to speak was profound, and Will let it stretch.  Hugh told himself he could hear waves against the hull, sounds that weren’t the hum of AC and the slight scuff of the chair on the floor when he moved it. 

With the memory of whitecaps held firm, he blurred back in.

“I wouldn’t say it was in my mind palace but…she was there, in the church.  Telling me about a world where we were together.   A world where you and I both made better choices.”

“Some cultures hypothesize the dead can travel through realties.  See infinite possibilities.”

“Maybe, or maybe she’s dead and I miss her.”  Her, and everything that could have been.  He didn’t need to say it for it to be clear he still felt a particular pang for everything they had been, everything lost and altered from the irrevocable moment Hannibal drew the blade across her throat.  They were almost parents, and then they weren’t.  Almost lovers, almost partners, almost enemies, almost—

He hadn’t even felt Hannibal’s hand underneath his, hadn’t realized his grip had shifted until now, holding on too tight.  The jut of Hannibal’s knuckles pressed against his palm, but Hannibal’s hand was limp.  Acquiescent, or waiting. 

Will swallowed.

“You planned it, but you never thought about it.”

“I didn’t _see_ it.  That doesn’t mean I hadn’t spent time in consideration.”

“Blind consideration?”

“It’s rare to have another kind.  Few of us have the certainty of being as sure as you can be of how advances might be received.”

For a moment, his living room in Wolf Trap flashed around him—scrabblings in the chimney, Alana’s perfume, the softness of her mouth.  It might have been the moment to point out, then, that he wasn’t at all sure of how many of his advances would be received, but he let it pass.  It didn’t matter, really, what his track record was or why.  In this world he’d drawn from his hat of infinite possibilities, there was only one advance left for him, and there was no doubt how it would be received. 

His only choice was whether or not he wanted to advance. 

He felt Hannibal shift his weight, his hand flexing.  A swell rolling the boat with his motion, perhaps.  Hannibal’s expectant inhale that followed gave way to words sooner than Will had expected.   “And how deeply have you considered the possibility of traveling as my husband?” 

God, he was raw at the edges.  It would have seemed strange in the moment to look at him and not see the skin of his belly peeled back, entrails exposed.  Vital organs prime for the taking—his heart already removed, impaled on an antler tine, beating even so. 

The antlers themselves rose like a ridge from Will’s arm, grew like a creeper along the rail.   Hannibal’s blood dripped artfully down to sizzle when it hit the water, congealing on the boat like wax.  Will wanted it on his skin. 

A quick shake of his head, and the vision faded. 

“The vows or the mechanics?” 

Hannibal kept his silence, and Will found himself grateful he’d caged the initial cruelty he’d felt trapped behind his teeth.  There was no sense pointing out that the title could have been nothing more than a cover on a sheet of paper.  Hannibal knew that better than he wanted to already.  Even the question he’d asked had been harsh enough, it seemed.

Will sighed, leaned forward and felt dizzy.  His elbows found the back of the railing and he leaned hard, drew back a little to settle his mind when he felt the chair tip. 

When he could hear the ocean again, he spoke.  “I had a dream while you were on trial that you were on top of me in the dark,  half strung up like you were when Brown—“

“Never give your own credit to empty hands.”

Will swallowed, and continued.  “Before.  You had a rope around your neck, around your arms and your waist.  It tightened every time you pushed into me.”  It was so clear, still.  The glow of his arm clock and the moon eerie and silver green on Hannibal’s pale skin, the labored cut of his breath as he struggled against his bonds.  The unyielding pressure of his cock.

“And I did it all the same.”

Will didn’t need to nod, but he found it happening with near fevered intensity.  At another point in time, Zeller might have made a crack about his resemblance to a bobblehead.  At another point in time, he wouldn’t be having this fucking bizarre discussion at all, not here and not from the other side of glass like he’d once or twice imagined he might.  On the road more travelled, he might never have had the dream at all. 

Hannibal’s fingers brushed the back of his neck and he startled like a colt, a quick twitch before he settled beneath the heat of his hand.  Frustratingly, rather than leave his palm pressed against Will’s spine, his touch turned light, fingers winding and tugging at the curls at the base of his skull. 

“How did it end, your dream?  Did you leave me to my predicament? 

Will’s cheeks flushed red, an answer for anyone and still not enough for Hannibal.  The grudging shake of his head he permitted then was more than he wanted to give, and woefully less than he had.  The burning shame he’d felt when he woke up was still there, as hot as the clarity of the dreams fevered desperation. 

He’d seen the pricks of light go out of Hannibal’s eyes, seen him slump, heard the terrible guttural sounds of asphyxiation and yet—

Hannibal’s mildly interested noise was far too understanding. 

“It’s not uncommon for a hanging victim to maintain an erection for some time.  It’s plausible, and equally plausible you would know I would have no objections to my body continuing to be of use to you.  On the contrary, I—“

“Can we not talk about this?”  The hot, wild pulse of something that was and wasn’t shame in his throat was distracting and harsh, dizzying.  Hugh wasn’t sure when, exactly, they’d gone off script but he was pretty sure the pages he’d been reading and memorizing for the last few days hadn’t said a damn thing about Hannibal _dying_ in the middle of sex, even in Will’s feverish dreams.

Now would be the time to shake himself out of this spiraling rehearsal, before it got farther afield. 

If they wanted, they could even regroup, return to the script. 

Hannibal’s hand settled warm and heavy onto the nape of his neck, guiding him in close, closer.  His head came to rest against the solid familiarity of Mads’s shoulder, and that should have been enough to do it.  He smelled like Mads, would _taste_ like Mads if Hugh shifted his head up and mouthed at his throat. 

He could find Mads, if he looked for him, but the hold and the posture were all Hannibal, his own thoughts and his racing heart all Will.

Hugh exhaled, and let his emergency exit window close. 

“Has every fantasy you’ve had about me involved my death?”  The fond humor was as endearing as the concept was repulsive.  Will gripped at Hannibal’s shirt, reflexive though something deep in him laughed at the irony.  He’d taken them both over a cliff, imagined slitting Hannibal’s throat and bathing in his blood.  The question was sound.  Sound, and uncomfortable for it, the taste bitter and poisonous. 

Will licked his lips.  “You assume there’s more.”

“Once would be a fluke.  Forgive me for the assumption, but a fluke would embarrass you less than the idea that killing me consistently arouses you.” 

“It doesn’t—“  _It doesn’t have to be death_.  Not of that kind, at least, but the words were thick on his tongue.  Now might be the time, too, to unhinge his jaw and tell him it was still too soon.  “Some of them are different.  They changed.” 

Without his consent, and startlingly so.  He’d woken up hard with Molly kissing his shoulder, eyes bright and a teasing lilt on her tongue because she thought he’d dreamed of her.  His face had been soft in his sleep, his hands tight in the sheets. 

In his mind, he’d been in Wolf Trap the morning after Mason.  Hannibal was underneath him in the sheets, his head thrown back.  Will’s hand at his throat was nothing more than a gentle tease, as soft as the sounds spilling from Hannibal’s mouth—rich and clear and treasured.  Will had felt himself storing them up in his chest, saving a room in his mind just for the music Hannibal made under the rhythm of Will’s hips. 

Strange, how suddenly the thought that he might someday show Hannibal that room no longer seemed impossible.

For now, he would keep that one, and give him another. 

“After I came back to see you—“  Hannibal’s other arm came around him, a cradle and an anchor.  Will felt its weight at the base of his spine, imagined nerves growing between them, black as oil and hair thin.  “—I had a dream that you laid me out on the alter in the church in Italy.  Tied like a sacrifice.” 

“A lamb without blemish.  An offering to God of the best I’d been given.” 

“Not without blemish.  You’d seen to that already.” 

“I cut you to keep you.  To render you unacceptable for atonement.”

The kitchen in Baltimore rose, tilting.  The stream rushed past Will’s feet, full of blood and tines like weeds.  “Something like that, yeah.”  It hurt to push the words out, but could he really deny any scrap of truth in them?  As his mind had told him when he woke up, Hannibal had known just how to cut him.  A cut for a keeper, not the slash of the discarded. 

For a moment he was reminded oddly of his childhood, his father’s friend cutting ‘junk’ fish down the line of their belly before he threw them back.  Long, and deep. 

The lack of the thick twist of a smile of tissue beneath his palm when he reached them to press against his stomach almost pulled Hugh out again.  Almost, if not for the anchor of Hannibal’s hand, the strange glitter of Hannibal in Mads’s eyes when he looked up to meet them. 

“I tried to talk to you, but I opened my mouth and there was wine, more of it the harder I tried and then it was everywhere and—“ And by the look on Hannibal’s face, there wasn’t much more clarification needed.  The world blurred and shifted, the conjoining of their palaces continuing on with a low grinding crunch in the background as they looked on at a shadow of themselves.

Will, bound naked to the alter, red wine bubbling up from his mouth like a font, seeping from his nipples, dribbling from his cock, trickling from his ass to run over the edge of the table, dripping on the floor. 

Another shift, and he was on the table, trying and trying to offer Hannibal a drink, to ask to be set free.  Whichever would have made it to the surface he wasn’t sure because none of it did, nothing but bubbles and wine and then Hannibal’s mouth was closing over his.

He kissed like he was drinking from him, tongue seeking and curling as if he was pulling some essential piece of Will into himself, lapping and tasting and still ravenous.  Will could feel himself trembling, drowning, allowing himself to be drowned.  He had been too full to breathe without Hannibal’s mouth on him, but now, now with Hannibal drinking every swell from his lips, he could survive in a limbo that felt something like breathing.  An exchange of life rather than air, a dizzying mystery. 

The kiss broke involuntarily, cut off by the startled jerk of his head as Hannibal’s hands squeezed firm at either side of his ass.  The sound that left his throat would have been embarrassing, but he was still lost in the peculiar ecstasy of the church, held, and offering.  Overflowing. 

Hannibal stepped back, though Will barely had time to feel off balance before his hands were being guided to grip the railing.  The reality of it stirred him away from the church, the feel of wine running down his legs replaced with the sudden shock of air as his pants were pulled down just to his thighs, exposing him. 

The feel of thumbs spreading the cheeks of his ass almost stirred him out of the scene entirely. 

Typically, if Mads was going to this, it was after a shower or a swim or—

No, there was no preamble to this, no hesitation.  A single soft scrape of stubble against sensitive skin, and then the unyielding thrust of tongue, deep and forceful. 

Hugh cried out, sharper and louder than he’d intended.  The shock was just too much to bear, his face flushed so blood red it was hot, radiating.  He’d pressed too hard against the chair and almost lost his balance as it tipped, one hand shooting forward to press against the table instead.  All that managed was to bend him over a little further, an unintended encouragement.  Already, his thighs shook. 

There was nothing for it but to follow through, because there was no denying, _no_ denying it would happen exactly like this—

Hannibal behind him at the rail, delving into him as if the wine of Will’s vision was utterly present and dripping down his thighs, nectar of the gods being lost in trickles because Hannibal couldn’t drink fast enough.  He would drink in Will’s cries the same way, the loud and startled and the muted and whining, sounds of oversensitivity, of nerves pushed almost too far by his intrusion. 

The puff of air that came with speech against his twitching hole was too distracting to be sure, but he was almost certain he could hear the word _exquisite_ murmured in utter rapture before Hannibal’s tongue was at it again.  It fucked him with surprising force, lapped with unsurprising dexterity.  Even the faint knock of teeth against his rim did nothing more than spark a fresh bolt to his gut, driven deeper by the muffled growl Hannibal made as his hands spread Will a little wider. 

He’d have come soon enough with nothing else required, the sensation too overwhelming, too pure and driven.  He would have, but he never had the chance to reach that height on his own.  Hannibal reached between his legs to rub firmly at his perineum, and oh _God_ that was it, the pressure almost clinical but far too reverent, too focused for any distance. 

As if he was still on the alter, and Hannibal was milking wine from his body with the deceptive strength in his hands. 

Hannibal’s name off his lips was choked like a sob, and that, too was right, as right as the arm that came around his waist to hold him up.  The oddly endearing pressure of Hannibal’s chin coming to rest just above the curve of his ass, the sharp puffs of his breath.  Knowing without know that behind him Hannibal had come untouched, his cock still in his pants, just from the pleasure of giving Will his mouth. 

No, not just.  The pleasure of Will opening to him, and all that came with it. 

When he had breathed until the air felt cold and his eyelids heavy, Hugh shook himself out of it, piece by piece.   The hand he’d pressed to the table had cramped, his wrist aching as he shifted his weight and flexed it.  Behind him, Mads hummed in contemplation and kissed his lower back, light and playful now, all traces of Hannibal Lecter shed as easily as a duck shakes rain. 

Hugh sighed, his hand flexing against as he reached for his wedding ring.  “Well, you weren’t wrong.  We needed to go through that.” 

“I told you.”  Mads’s hand stroked his ribs once before patting teasingly at his ass, the air shifting around them as Mads sat back on his heels.  “I told you we had to do it.  I didn’t want to wait until Monday to find out it was wrong.”

“You were that sure?”

“I suspected.”

The next interview he had, he’d be talking about Mads’s acting skills again, his ability to know Hannibal down to his bones.  He just hoped he could do it without _this_ being written all over his face.  With a groan he straightened and stretched, reached down to pull his trousers up only to have Mads catch his wrist, his squeeze gentle. 

“Not yet, min kære.  He’d have been finished, but I’m not.” 

The last vestiges of the scene fell away from them with Hugh’s laughter, warm and bright and still there as Mads drew him down to the soft carpet on the floor. 


End file.
